Major Spoilers Question of the Day: Charming Vs. Alarming Edition

As a young man, I loved the heck out of ‘Say Anything…’ a movie about a young man who has very specific ideas about what he doesn’t want out of life, romance and the whole after-high-school thing. During the course of the movie, he stands in his then-ex-girlfriend’s yard, playing Their Song at high volume in the hopes of winning her back. In context, it’s wonderful, romantic and meaningful. In real life, it would likely result in a restraining order. ‘How I Met Your Mother’ refers to that dichotomy as the “Dobler/Dahmer Dilemma”, opining that the line of Charming Vs. Alarming is all about whether you’re into the person making the gesture, which leads us to today’s stalkery query…

The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) still thinks that the entirety of ‘Fifty First Dates’ is utterly terrifying if you look at it from Drew Barrymoore’s perspective, asking: Which ostensibly romantic pop culture moment falls on the wrong side of the Charming Vs. Alarming scale for you?

About Author

Once upon a time, there was a young nerd from the Midwest, who loved Matter-Eater Lad and the McKenzie Brothers... If pop culture were a maze, Matthew would be the Minotaur at its center. Were it a mall, he'd be the Food Court. Were it a parking lot, he’d be the distant Cart Corral where the weird kids gather to smoke, but that’s not important right now... Matthew enjoys body surfing (so long as the bodies are fresh), writing in the third person, and dark-eyed women. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: Fear! Surprise! Ruthless efficiency! An almost fanatical devotion to pop culture!
And a nice red uniform.

I always take those scenes as a “What NOT To Do” lesson. I always figured public proposals are intimidating the other person to where they HAVE to say yes or else they look like the bad guy. There are exceptions, of course (people who have been together a long time, smaller public proposals with a few friends, etc.), but most of them seem a bit more on the creepy side.

The entirety of the god awful Twilight franchise. A friend’s wife gave me the cliff notes of the series which boils down to date the creepy abusive stalker and then turn the nice charming guy into a pedophile so he can date your daughter.